Happy Sysadmin Day

http://www.sysadmin.com. It’s nice to have a day. Without fail though, every year I forget about it until late in the afternoon when someone sends an email to some list or somehow reminds me. Alas, neither myself nor my co-workers were lavished with gifts today.

“A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out. A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods. When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work. A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.”

So, if you can read this, thank your sysadmin. And thank me too, since I admin the virtual server where this particular blog lives. And thank andyburn while you’re at it, since he runs the actual physical colo server that the virtual server lives on until I can get off my butt and get real hosted service somewhere.